“Swiss researchers released a paper on Tuesday outlining a way to speed the cracking of alphanumeric Windows passwords, reducing the time to break such codes to an average of 13.6 seconds, from 1 minute 41 seconds,” reports Robert Lemos for CNET News.com.
“The results highlight a fact about which many security researchers have worried: Microsoft’s manner for encoding passwords has certain weaknesses that make such techniques particularly effective, Philippe Oechslin, a senior research assistant and lecturer at the Cryptography and Security Laboratory of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), wrote in an e-mail to CNET News.com,” Lemos reports. “‘Windows passwords are not very good,’ he wrote. ‘The problem with Windows passwords is that they do not include any random information.'” Full article here.
Last Wednesday Microsoft acknowledged a critical vulnerability in nearly all versions of its flagship Windows operating system software two days after the U.S. Department of Homeland Security said it had awarded a five-year, $90 million enterprise agreement to Microsoft Corp to become the department’s primary technology provider.
Now, don’t you U.S. residents feel safer?